Trudeau's promised made-in-Canada vaccine plant hasn't produced any shots
At the height of the COVID19 pandemic, Prime Minis‐ ter Justin Trudeau made a multi-million dollar fund‐ ing commitment to build a vaccine plant in Montreal to churn out Canadianmade COVID-19 shots by the end of 2020.
Four years later, not a single vial of usable vaccine has rolled off the line.
The publicly owned Bio‐ logics Manufacturing Centre (BMC) was built quickly on National Research Councilowned land at the site of a former animal vaccines plant, thanks to a cash injection of nearly $130 million from the federal government.
While construction was mostly complete by June 2021 and certified by Health Canada as compliant with its regulations in July 2022, the taxpayer-funded facility has‐ n't yet done what it was in‐ tended to do - produce vials of vaccines at scale for pa‐ tient use.
Meanwhile, the National Research Council (NRC) is still bankrolling the facility with $17 million in annual funding to help keep about 100 em‐ ployees working on site, ac‐ cording to figures provided by the NRC, the federal gov‐ ernment's research and de‐ velopment arm.
Novavax, the U.S. firm that's expected to manufac‐ ture its shots at the BMC, told CBC News it still intends to push ahead with Canadianmade
COVID vaccines despite delays.
The firm, the BMC and the NRC have repeatedly blown past supposed start dates and have told the media at various points that produc‐ tion would start in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Some experts are wonder‐ ing whether it's worth the ef‐ fort, as COVID vaccine sales plummet worldwide and Pfizer and Moderna maintain their stranglehold on what's left of the market.
Another COVID vaccine maker, AstraZeneca, recently pulled its product, citing a global surplus of COVID vac‐ cines.
WATCH: Canada still without vaccine plant de‐ spite federal promises (from 2022)
Dr. Earl Brown is a profes‐ sor emeritus at the Univer‐ sity of Ottawa's school of medicine and an expert in vi‐ rology and microbiology.
Brown said there is a "niche" market for Novavax's subunit vaccine, which uses a different technology than the mRNA products from Pfizer and Moderna.
Novavax has been able to sell some of its protein-based vaccine to patients who want an alternative to mRNA.
But Brown questions whether the mRNA-sceptic market is big enough to sus‐ tain a large operation like the BMC over the longer term.
As of February, only 37,343 Novavax shots had been administered in Cana‐ da, compared to more than 70 million Pfizer doses and about 33 million Moderna shots, according to Public Health Agency of Canada da‐ ta.
"Can they be viable in the COVID market? Will they sell enough product to keep themselves alive? I think it's questionable that they sur‐ vive. There are two big vac‐ cine winners and Novavax is‐ n't one of them," Brown said.
"I'm very concerned when I hear about a vaccine facility that's not pumping out pro‐ ducts. When they sit idle, that's a bad sign. You should be busy all the time, you should be active, current, having your staff putting out licensed product continuous‐ ly."
Brown said he supported the construction of a publi‐ cly-owned vaccine plant in the "fog of 2020" but the longer it remains in limbo, the less viable it will be.
He said the federal gov‐ ernment may eventually get tired of pumping $17 million into a plant that's not pro‐ ducing anything - or some‐ thing that's not really in high demand.
He added there's "amne‐ sia with pandemics in the ex‐ treme" and Ottawa may sim‐ ply move on from plans to prepare the country for the next health crisis.
"It's a bit scary when you think of other Crown corpo‐ rations in the past," he said, referring to the once worldleading Connaught Labs in
Toronto that was at the fore‐ front of vaccine development for decades before it was pri‐ vatized.
"With a Crown corpora‐ tion, you want them to be run off their feet. Filling sup‐ ply, using fresh materials, not throwing out materials, reagents that haven't been used for a year. And this plant - it's really just sitting there."
'This is like the Apollo project'
After a failed partnership with a Chinese vaccine com‐ pany, Ottawa picked Novavax to produce that company's COVID product at the Mon‐ treal site.
In announcing the pivot to Novavax in February 2021, Trudeau said the publicly owned facility would produce tens of millions of shots by that summer.
It was billed as a way to lessen Canada's dependence on foreign sources at a time of rapacious global competi‐ tion for other products from Pfizer and Moderna.
"This is a major step for‐ ward to get vaccines made in Canada, for Canadians," Trudeau said.
Also in February 2021, In‐ dustry Minister FrancoisPhilippe Champagne com‐ pared building this sort of fa‐ cility - from the ground up, on a constrained timeline - to the U.S. effort to put an as‐ tronaut on the moon.
"This is like the Apollo project," Champagne said. "Normally, it would take two to three years to do this, to get a production facility up and running."
Three years on, it appears it will take even longer than that to get production started.
WATCH: Minister says production of COVID-19 vaccines will begin in Cana‐ da (from 2021)
In a media statement, a spokesperson for Novavax told CBC News the company is expected to "complete en‐ gineering runs" and move to "producing process perfor‐ mance qualification batches for the updated strain" of its vaccine at the BMC facility sometime in 2024.
Novavax told CBC News in 2022 it was completing the necessary "tech transfer" to the BMC site and was prepar‐ ing to integrate "supply from this facility into our vaccine program." The company also previously said it would be producing those "perfor‐ mance qualification batches" in early 2023.
Before COVID hit, Novavax had never actually brought a vaccine to market.
Novavax's financial viabil‐ ity is an ongoing concern. Its stock dropped dramatically after it failed to make sub‐ stantial inroads with its vac‐ cine.
But earlier this month, it secured an investment from French drugmaker Sanofi, which could stabilize its oper‐ ations and help get another product in development - a influenza-COVID combo vac‐ cine - to market.
"Novavax isn't a deep company right now. They've had problems with their sup‐ ply line, they failed two phase 3 clinical trials with their RSV vaccine. That's hundreds of millions of dollars lost. They've emptied their pock‐ ets and the company is a bit tenuous right now," Brown said.
A spokesperson for the NRC referred all questions about the BMC and the No‐ vavax partnership to the BMC.
A spokesperson for the BMC, which has been spun off from the government and established as an indepen‐ dent not-for-profit corpora‐ tion, would not comment on the facility's progress with the Novavax product.
"We will need to refer you back to Novavax as they are the sole owner of the com‐ munication for the initiative," the spokesperson said.
But the spokesperson ad‐ ded the BMC is "on a great trajectory," is "building its ca‐ pacity and service offerings" and is engaged in "analytical testing with other partners."
The BMC spokesperson said they could not say who the "other partners" are be‐ cause they're legally bound to keep that secret.
The federal government continues to support the fa‐ cility with annual funding - to pay staff who work at a facil‐ ity that could, in theory, pivot to making other, non-COVID products that Canadians need now or in the future.
The NRC provides annual funding to "ensure the facility is maintained in a good man‐ ufacturing practices readi‐ ness state and is prepared to respond to future public health emergencies," says the NRC's website.